Thursday, January 1, 1981

Wednesday December 31st

Identical to yesterday. In the evening, I completed my third season for divisions one and two and Uncle Kenneth came. It is Dad’s birthday today, his fifty-first. Uncle Kenneth became his usual alcoholic self, and didn’t stay long. On his way back, he gave Andrew a lift to a party at Geoff Marchbank’s.

As midnight approached, we were all given the perfunctory glass of sherry and we held a toast to 1981 and to “peace” as Big-Ben chimed away 1980. Shortly after, Mum and Dad went to bed leaving me watching the “Old Grey Whistle Test” pick of ’80. Andrew returned at 0110 – I could tell immediately that he was drunk, for his eyes were glassy and bloodshot and he came in with a stupid grin all over his face – there he sat for half an hour, jovial in an uncoordinated, drugged sort of way – before eventually coming up at 01.40.

Today the weather has been windy – gale force all day. Nineteen eighty one – only nine years and it’ll be the futuristic 1990!

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ABOUT MERE PSEUD . . .

"It's about time you started thinking about the black dog on your back."

Mere Pseud takes us back to an everyday England dreaming its way through the clamor of Thatcher, the Falklands War, the Miner's Strike and postpunk. This is the moveable backdrop for what is part social history, part prolonged pratfall, part alienated melodrama, the spectral traces of an early ‘eighties England that is already curiously antique. "It's about time you started thinking about the void in your life."

"The journal has such familiar episodes . . . being a certain age at a certain time in history, the political atmosphere, cultural touchstones, living situations . . . desires to both escape and belong ending in nihilistic abyss of fuckitall."

PRINCIPAL DRAMATIS PERSONAE, SUMMER 1983

The Mere Pseud . . . The unreliable eighteen-year old modernist narrator of this fable. Now a student at Watermouth University. Perhaps he'll run into Howard Kirk?Barry, Stu, Pete, Penny, Gareth, Shelley, Lindsey. University friends.

Rowan Morrison. Dark-eyed changeling who lived a few doors down from the Mere Pseud his first year at Wollstonecraft. A little older and a little weirder than all the rest. Her dark sun sends a chill through the second floor corridors of Wollstonecraft.

Helen Vaughan . . . (1864-1919). Enigmatic Yorkshire novelist, author of The Harp of the Sky (1920), and inspiration for British horror writer Arthur Machen's character of the same name in his story "The Great God Pan." Occasional object of the Mere Pseud's obsessive thoughts about death, time, and the passing of all things.

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